The cofounder of Pixar Animation Studios recalls how a serious organizational rift led him to a new sense of mission\u2014and how it helped Pixar develop a more open and sustainable creative culture.<\/p>\n
I wish I could<\/strong>\u00a0bottle how it felt to come into work during those first heady days after\u00a0Toy Story<\/em>\u00a0came out. People seemed to walk a little taller, they were so proud of what we\u2019d done. We\u2019d been the first to make a movie with computers, and\u2014even better\u2014audiences were touched deeply by the story we told. As my colleagues went about their work, every interaction was informed by a sense of pride and accomplishment. We had succeeded by holding true to our ideals; nothing could be better than that. The core team who had joined us in 1994 to edit\u00a0Toy Story<\/em>\u00a0immediately moved on to\u00a0A Bug\u2019s Life<\/em>, our movie about the insect world. There was excitement in the air.<\/p>\n But while I could\u00a0feel<\/em>\u00a0that euphoria, I was oddly unable to participate in it.<\/p>\n For 20 years, my life had been defined by the goal of making the first computer-graphics movie. Now that this goal had been reached, I had what I can only describe as a hollow, lost feeling. As a manager, I felt a troubling lack of purpose.\u00a0Now what?<\/em>\u00a0The act of running a company was more than enough to keep me busy, but it wasn\u2019t\u00a0special<\/em>. Pixar was now successful, yet there was something unsatisfying about the prospect of merely keeping it running.<\/p>\n It took a serious and unexpected problem to give me a new sense of mission.<\/p>\n For all of my talk about the leaders of thriving companies who did stupid things because they\u2019d failed to pay attention, I discovered that, during the making of\u00a0Toy Story<\/em>, I had completely missed something that was threatening to undo us. And I\u2019d missed it even though I\u00a0thought<\/em>\u00a0I\u2019d been paying attention.<\/p>\n Throughout the making of the movie, I had seen my job, in large part, as minding the internal and external dynamics that could divert us from our goal. I was determined that Pixar not make the same mistakes I\u2019d watched other Silicon Valley companies make. To that end, I\u2019d made a point of being accessible to our employees, wandering into people\u2019s offices to check in and see what was going on. John Lasseter and I had very conscientiously tried to make sure that everyone at Pixar had a voice, that every job and every employee was treated with respect. I truly believed that self-assessment and constructive criticism had to occur at all levels of a company, and I had tried my best to walk that talk.<\/p>\n Now, though, as we assembled the crew to work on\u00a0A Bug\u2019s Life<\/em>, I discovered we\u2019d completely missed a serious, ongoing rift between our creative and production departments. In short, production managers told me that working on\u00a0Toy Story<\/em>\u00a0had been a nightmare. They felt disrespected and marginalized\u2014like second-class citizens. And while they were gratified by\u00a0Toy Story<\/em>\u2019s success, they were very reluctant to sign on to work on another film at Pixar.<\/p>\n I was floored. How had we missed this?<\/p>\n The answer, at least in part, was rooted in the role production managers play in making our films. Production managers monitor the overall progress of the crew; they keep track of the thousands of shots; they evaluate how resources are being used; they persuade and cajole and nudge and say no when necessary. In other words, they do something essential for a company whose success relies on hitting deadlines and staying on budget: they manage people and safeguard the process.<\/p>\n If there was one thing we prided ourselves on at Pixar, it was making sure that Pixar\u2019s artists and technical people treated each other as equals, and I had assumed that same mutual respect would be afforded to those who managed the productions. I had assumed wrong. Sure enough, when I checked with the artists and technical staff, they\u00a0did<\/em>\u00a0believe that production managers were second class and that they impeded\u2014not facilitated\u2014good filmmaking by overcontrolling the process, by micromanaging. Production managers, the folks I consulted told me, were just sand in the gears.<\/p>\n Further reading: https:\/\/www.mckinsey.com\/industries\/technology-media-and-telecommunications\/our-insights\/building-a-sense-of-purpose-at-pixar<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The cofounder of Pixar Animation Studios recalls how a serious organizational rift led him to a new sense of mission\u2014and how it helped Pixar develop a more open and sustainable creative culture. I wish I could\u00a0bottle how it felt to come into work during those first heady days after\u00a0Toy Story\u00a0came out. People seemed to walk […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbs.binus.ac.id\/management\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbs.binus.ac.id\/management\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbs.binus.ac.id\/management\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbs.binus.ac.id\/management\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbs.binus.ac.id\/management\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3930"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bbs.binus.ac.id\/management\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3933,"href":"https:\/\/bbs.binus.ac.id\/management\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3930\/revisions\/3933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbs.binus.ac.id\/management\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbs.binus.ac.id\/management\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbs.binus.ac.id\/management\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}